Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ operations at Montbéliard, in occupied France, showed how a small group of men could take out a machine-gun turret where successive bombing raids had failed. Finally, and probably more importantly than anything else it achieved, as M.R.D. Foot has noted, SOE gave a sense of self-respect back to countries, in Europe and the Far East, whose conventional armies had been totally overpowered by the Axis Powers. Many of the agents it dropped into occupied territories to assist local resistance groups displayed remarkable bravery. Wing Cmmdr. Forrest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas (codenamed ‘the White Rabbit’) forged valiant links with the French resistance and managed to escape Nazi captivity. Others, such as Violette Szabo, did not live to tell their tale, succumbing to Nazi interrogation, torture and execution. In total, SOE sent fifty-five female agents into occupied Europe, thirteen of whom were either killed in action or executed.⁵¹

      BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AND WARTIME ‘RENDITION’

      During the Second World War British intelligence developed imperial responsibilities in ways that it simply hitherto had not. MI5 posted more officers to British colonial and Commonwealth countries than it ever had previously, and GC&CS dramatically expanded its capabilities, hoovering up enemy traffic from its regional collection stations across the empire. Meanwhile, SOE armed guerrilla fighters against the Axis Powers. However, there is one chapter in the story of Britain’s wartime imperial intelligence responsibilities that is apparently so sensitive it has only recently been disclosed. It has some remarkable parallels with controversial intelligence and security practices in the present day.

      As part of its counter-espionage efforts, during the Second World War British intelligence ran a top-secret process of detaining, interrogating and transporting enemy agents between various parts of the British empire. At times this came close to being a form of state-sponsored kidnapping – closely resembling the process of ‘extraordinary rendition’ employed by the US government in the so-called ‘war on terror’ closer to our own time. After December 1940, Ultra decrypts revealed a number of German agents operating throughout the British empire and Commonwealth. In the first six months of 1942, six high-level agents were identified (but not arrested) in different British colonies, and in June 1942 one of them operating in Mombasa, in Kenya, was detained by local police. His detention sparked a debate within MI5 about what should be done with him and other such agents. MI5 wanted them, as well as any other agents who may have been working in different parts of the empire, to be interrogated, and if possible turned into double agents as part of its Double Cross System. However, MI5’s officers in Section B1a, responsible for counter-espionage, were reluctant to have them interrogated in the distant outposts of empire, where effective methods could not be guaranteed. Furthermore, MI5 feared that if the identified agents were interrogated locally, it would have to release the most closely guarded secret of the war, Ultra, to colonial authorities who could not necessarily be trusted – interrogators invariably used information derived from Ultra to trick enemy agents into thinking that British intelligence knew everything about their missions. Instead, MI5 wanted the agents to be brought to its own top-secret interrogation facility, Camp 020, located in a former lunatic asylum, Latchmere House, in Ham Common, a suburb of South London.

      Camp 020, which probably derives its name from the ‘Twenty Committee’ responsible for overseeing the Double Cross System, operated outside the control of any British government department except for MI5, and was without legal oversight. Its aim was to isolate and ‘break’ enemy agents, who were held without trial, in some cases for years, with the intention of turning them into double agents. Because its detainees were non-combatant enemy agents, international regulations concerning the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to Camp 020. Nor was it inspected or listed by the Red Cross. In short, its detainees were placed in a legal void. The question that MI5 needed answering was whether it was legally justifiable to detain foreign nationals, and transport them from British territories overseas for interrogation in Britain. One of the leading figures in B-Division, Dick White, put it in the following terms to MI5’s legal adviser Toby Pilcher (a future High Court judge):

      … we shall find ourselves in a particularly serious position if it is ruled that the legal machinery for detaining an enemy agent in a Colony and subsequently bringing him to the U.K. is found to be faulty in law … I am afraid that this is a case in which we cannot leave the matter in doubt, for were the detention of an enemy agent brought here under this proposal to be tested by Habeas Corpus [the legal process by which a prisoner can demand to be brought before a court], in all probability it would be a moment when he was already installed in Camp 020. Subsequent publicity attendant upon a test of Habeas Corpus would be extremely detrimental to Camp 020 and might jeopardise our whole position with regard to it.⁵²

      Under the draconian Defence Regulations that had been enacted in Britain on the outbreak of war, it was impossible for the overwhelming majority of those detained to bring habeas corpus proceedings against the responsible authorities – which was invariably MI5, acting behind the cover of the ‘War Office’. That said, in at least one case a detainee did demand to be brought before a court, though unsurprisingly, given how expansive the British state’s powers of detention were under the Defence Regulations, his case was ultimately unsuccessful.⁵³

      There is also some evidence to suggest that there was more going on behind the scenes in the famous wartime legal case of Liversidge v Anderson in 1942 than appears in the recorded judgement of the House of Lords. The case has gone down in the annals of legal history as a low point in the story of civil liberties and the rule of law in Britain, with the judiciary cowing before the power of the executive. It involved a Polish-born naturalised British citizen, Jack Perlzweig, who went by the name of Liversidge, who was detained in 1940 under Regulation 18b of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939. This regulation allowed the Home Secretary (Sir John Anderson) to detain persons of hostile origin if he had ‘reasonable grounds’ to suspect them of being involved in acts contrary to the defence of the realm. Put simply, Mr Liversidge asked to see what evidence the Home Secretary had against him, and asked the court to consider whether it constituted ‘reasonable grounds’ for his detention without trial, which he argued was false imprisonment. The majority verdict of the Law Lords – who heard the case in an annexe to the House of Lords because their usual chamber had been bombed out in the Blitz – stated that in times of national emergency courts had no authority to question whether the Home Secretary’s evidence against an individual constituted reasonable grounds for his detention. It is likely that the ‘reasonable grounds’ for Liversidge’s detention were really derived from adverse intelligence on him provided by MI5. The case of Liversidge v Anderson was really, it seems, to do with how intelligence could be introduced into court, which was difficult, if not impossible, because the British government only tacitly recognised the existence of MI5. The use of intelligence as evidence is an issue that courts in England, and in the Western world more generally, are still grappling with to the present day.

      There was a significant problem for MI5 when it came to the detention and transportation of enemy agents from overseas territories to Britain. By a curious omission in the colonial legislation passed by Parliament on the outbreak of war, Colonial Order 12(5)a, there was no equivalent to Defence Regulation 18b, which meant that it was legally permissible for aliens detained in British colonies to bring habeas corpus proceedings. This brought a stark warning from MI5’s legal adviser Toby Pilcher, who stated that in his opinion, under the existing legislation it was ‘undesirable, and probably illegal, to remove an alien from a ship and detain him in a colony’. Following a high-powered meeting in June 1942 between Dick White, Pilcher and the Colonial Office’s legal adviser, it was decided that the only way to resolve the problem was to introduce ‘ad hoc legislation’ under the Defence Regulations ‘specifically empowering the Governor [of a colony] to remove a suspect alien from a ship or aircraft visiting the colony, and to detain him pending his removal from the colony’. Before long MI5 and the Colonial Office had formulated a written codicil, or warrant, which could be quickly signed by colonial governors allowing enemy aliens to be detained on British territory and then rendered to Britain for interrogation. This was precisely what occurred during the rest of СКАЧАТЬ